Can grape vines yield health and happiness? These guys will drink to that

When the emails, phone calls, and paperwork get to be too much for Tom Altemus, he does what most us do: He gets out of his chair, strolls down the hall, and steps outside to a gently sloping field teeming with long, tidy rows of grape vines. “I like to get out of the office and talk to the vines, see how they’re doing,” he says with a dry chuckle.

Pity that most of us don’t own a vineyard. It makes for a lovely front yard, and some regular tinkering amidst six acres of vines is perhaps the most scenic workout a man could hope for. Stepping out onto his Howell Mountain patio some 1,900 feet above California’s fabled Napa Valley, Altemus hands me a glass of deep red wine—his Red Cap cabernet sauvignon—and plops down into an Adirondack chair. “Welcome to my office.”

Altemus is keenly aware of the difference between his office and, well, yours and mine. For the first eight years out of college, he worked in finance for IBM, a consummate corporate soldier, dutifully marching to cubicles in New York , Colorado, and California. Then, with IBM downsizing, he decided to right-size his life. A buyout was tendered, which prompted, at age 29, some restless soul-searching. “It forced me to think: Do I want to be the American ideal of corporate success?” he recalls. “Or do I want to take a chance on my own brand of happiness?”

There is a vast, if often foggy, landscape of studies suggesting that our subjective wellbeing—happiness, optimism, satisfaction, serenity—can play an important role in our physical health. One Carnegie Mellon study, for instance, suggested “positive” people might be more likely to resist colds and flu. A landmark University of Kentucky study even linked positive emotions with longevity. Granted, it was a study of 180 Catholic nuns, but they’re an honest bunch with similar lifestyles and, well, habits.

Oddly enough, there is arguably more scientific evidence about the health benefits of toasting your happiness than the impact of happiness itself. Or at least toasting it with red wine. As you’ve no doubt heard, scientists have been busy trying to pinpoint the root of the so-called French Paradox, in which those fatty-food-eating, wine-swilling Frenchies suffer considerably less heart disease than we perpetually dieting, temperance-minded Americans. Regular wine consumption could be one explanation. As a relatively new field of study, the conclusions and conjecture often swirl faster than wine in a sommelier’s glass. But a growing consensus points to the notion that the antioxidants and anti-aging chemicals in red wine may do a body good.

Put the treadmill on eBay and head for the liquor store? Not exactly. No one is suggesting you trade workouts for wine—and a case of cabs won’t give you six-pack abs. But many researchers and doctors are suggesting that, barring liver conditions and the like, you can enjoy a glass or two of red wine a day. Moderation is key, but consistency may be as well. Like many Europeans, the French are apt to drink wine everyday, and some studies are discounting the benefits for weekend wine drinkers.

Yet the wine itself is clearly only one part of the lifestyle equation, even in wine country. You need only spend a few days around people who make and love wine to sense there’s something larger at work, and at play, here. The recipe varies, but you’ll find the same ingredients in many of these guys. They don’t love nature in the abstract; they want to work there. They’ll tell you they’re artists and farmers in the same sentence. They’re laid back and competitive, organic and capitalistic. They respect traditional ways but want to try something new. They drink what they sow. Most of all, they’re incredibly passionate about what they do, and they really want to—maybe need to—share it with you.

Perhaps no place in America is more emblematic of this spirit than Napa Valley. The valley itself is a dichotomy. It is the face the U.S. wine industry shows to the world, but it’s a small place and, in bottle count, a bit player in its own state: California produces about 90 percent of the wine made in the U.S., but Napa Valley makes only 4 percent of the wine from California. Yet, flanked by the Mayacamas mountains and the Howell Mountain range, about 50 miles north of San Francisco, Napa is prized for its rich soils and wide variety of microclimates, from the rich valley floor to the rocky hillsides.

It’s also prized for that spirit. The air smells different here, like inspiration. And people come from all over the country, indeed all over the world, to breathe it in.For Altemus, the road from crunching numbers to crushing grapes was hardly a straight line, or an easy path. Eager to indulge his creative side, and always good in the kitchen, Altemus took the buyout, enrolled in culinary school in San Francisco, and simultaneously began cooking in restaurants. Most days left no free time, and only five hours for sleep. His career as a chef lasted about five years. “Cooking was a great job and really suited my personality,” he says, “but it just wasn’t suitable for family life.” So with the birth of his first child, Altemus became a part-time caterer and stay-at-home dad.

But the grapes were calling. He and his wife Desiree were making regular wine-tasting pilgrimages to Napa, and daydreaming of the life they really wanted, one surrounded by the natural beauty of the valley and immersed in the liquid sunshine of its vineyards. Aiming to “design a lifestyle,” as he puts it, they bought a starter home in Napa, and soon began looking for elbow room to accommodate a growing family—a house with some privacy and a yard big enough for the kids. But when he found that house sitting on a wild 10-acre parcel atop Howell Mountain, a hilltop known for producing uniquely vibrant cabernet grapes, he fortuitously, almost inadvertently, found his future.

Sometimes, the grapes choose you.

Today, Altemus sells about half of his grapes, and makes 270 cases of Red Cap with the rest, a “small-time Philly guy” competing with world-class wineries. The wine is rich; he isn’t. It’s a struggle, but one with few regrets. He gets to share the business with his family. When he needs a break, he bikes the long, winding mountain trail behind his vineyard, or plays golf on a course down the road. And he lives inside his dream, not a spreadsheet. “I’ll take the tradeoffs,” he says. “Taste the wine…we’re good.”

That sort of calculus isn’t lost on Mike Hirby. Of course, he didn’t have a lot to lose. Two years out of college in Colorado, and flat broke from a trip to France that failed to yield a promised winery job there, he came to Napa Valley and set up at the only place he could afford: a campground in Calistoga, at the valley’s northern end. After a few nights, they kicked him out. “They said they didn’t want residents,” he recalls. Welcome to Napa.

Hirby was undeterred, as any guitar-playing young man from Wisconsin with a philosophy degree would be about his prospects in the promised land of American vino. Soon enough, he latched onto a winery job helping the owner harvest 100 tons of grapes, a job he nearly didn’t get when he showed up at the interview wearing a tie. He stayed for two years, refining his palette at informal wine gatherings and visiting wineries, before being offered a job as the winemaker at a new venture called Realm Cellars, now a respected maker of cabernets and cab blends. “I feel very lucky. There were some generous people who were willing to take a risk on me,” he says. “But I had to take some big risks myself…and not be afraid to fail.”

Failure is an option in Napa, as elsewhere. But to guys like Hirby, still considered one of the “young guns” of Napa winemaking at a boyish 37, you’d have to fail by your own measure of success, not someone else’s. “I wanted to make wine, so there was no Plan B,” he says with calm self-assurance.

And make wine he did—lots of it. In addition to Realm and a couple of other wineries, Hirby and his wife Schatzi have their own “self-indulgent” brand called Relic. To sate his winemaking wanderlust, Relic gathers grapes from all over the region and produces, well, a bit of everything: cabernet, syrah, pinot noir, chardonnay, blends. “I love seeing how something that grows from the ground can be transformed so radically, yet still express a sense of place,” he explains.

You hear that a lot out here, this talk of place, even from thoroughly unpretentious guys like Hirby. The earth and the sky nourish the vines and imbue their juicy offspring with the unique flavorful DNA of a region, a town, a vineyard, a plateau, even a row. And if the winemaker does right by his fruit, sipping that wine can summon its place of origin, its birth year, and perhaps an old weather report. Or so the theory goes. It’s not terribly important whether it’s all true, only that a winemaker cares enough to believe it. Hilby’s in that club. “I want to create wines that take people out of their everyday experience, something that captures a moment in time, something they’ll remember five or 10 years down the road,” he says. He also hikes, runs, backpacks, snowboards, and plays in a loud rock-and-roll band called Wrist Rocket. Which proves that, in Napa, even regular guys talk like that too.

It’s a fair bet that few people think of Todd Anderson as a regular guy. Unless, perhaps, your idea of regular is a gregarious Type A geologist with an iconoclastic streak. Anderson is no stranger to physical labor, and he’s more than a little proud of what he’s built, much of it with his own two hands – he’ll mention once or twice that’s pounded every fence post in himself. Still, sitting at a small table in the dank coolness of a wine cave on his 40-acre spread east of St. Helena, watching him pour wine without breaking verbal stride, it’s easy to imagine he’s a tour guide, not the proprietor, at Anderson’s Conn Valley vineyards.

His favorite part of the wine business? “I love the people,” he says. “Yeah, we need to sell wine, that’s how we make our living. But we do that by sharing our passion for what we do.” And to preach the gospel, he opens his winery to the public seven days a week, eight hours a day.Anderson came to Napa prodded by his father, who dreamed of owning a vineyard. An outsider, he had no wine pedigree, but he had a farmboy’s work ethic and a geologist’s knowledge of the earth. More importantly, he says, he had no preconceived notions about the type of wine he should be making. Rather than follow the Old World recipe of subtler wines thought more capable of aging well, Anderson was among the first to embrace Napa’s long, sunny growing season to produce “big” cabernets from riper, juicer grapes – but with enough balance to drink right away.

He takes issue with the conventional wine wisdom. “Wines get different with age, not necessarily better with age,” he professes. Besides, he says, wine is a very personal thing. “Everybody that comes in here is more of a wine expert than I am because I can’t tell you what you like.”

Not content to tweak the elitists from the ground, Anderson takes them on in the rarified air of so-called “cult” wines too. A little side project called Ghost Horse produces cabs that sell for between $500 and $5,000 a bottle. Yes, a bottle. And there’s a catch. “You have to meet me to get it,” he explains. No retail sales, no Internet sales, no faceless mailing lists. A handshake comes first. Oh, and another thing. It’s unrated by the critics, because he won’t give them any to sample. “I don’t want people buying it just to have it, because they heard about some rating or tasting. I want people to come and experience it, and buy it because they like it and are going to drink it.”

For a price—a hefty price—he will bring it to you, personally, complete with a catered dinner party. In fact, between the two wine brands, he often takes his evangelism on the road. “I actually like being in seat 2B of American Airlines because I know I’m on my way to someplace to have fun,” he says.

There is tradition in Napa. There’s no shortage of multi-generational families here, and scores of well-known names like Mondavi, Cakebread, Beringer, and Sterling line Route 29, Napa’s main drag. Yet, at his core, Napa is less a tourist destination than it is a place where people come to reinvent themselves, and to reinvigorate the wine business in the process. And they come from all over, and at all stages of life.

Dr. Madaiah Revana, for example, is not the sort of fellow who seems to need a hobby. A highly regarded cardiologist in Houston, Dr. Revana could easily fill all of his waking hours tending to the hearts of his patients. But tending to his own heart, metaphysically, called for a career supplement: winemaker.

Raised in rural India by a farming family, he was no stranger to the fields. But it wasn’t until he traveled to Italy in his late 40s that he caught the wine bug. And while a Tuscan estate might have proved impractical for a Houston doctor, Napa was, comparatively, right around the corner.

Not one to pursue anything half-heartedly, Dr. Revana found his little piece of heaven just north of St. Helena, and hired on two of Napa’s heavy hitters, vineyard manager Jim Barbour and winemaker Heidi Barrett. The talent shows, both in the wine—one of the most respected cabs in the valley—and at the winery. Sitting quietly at a long table in the vineyard’s tasting room, voices suddenly rise and chairs quickly empty as Barrett walks into the room. A dozen or so grown men begin jockeying to get their picture taken with her, a wine geek’s rock star.

Dr. Revana’s own reward is a little more under the radar. “I get great satisfaction from helping to create a perfect bottle of wine meant to be shared with friends and family,” he says. “Just the other day I received a note from a couple that I met recently in Hawaii telling me what a nice evening they had sharing a bottle of Revana wine. It makes me proud to be a part of that process.”

And a cardiologist-winemaker’s take on making dreams come true? “Finding my passion and being able to make it a reality has definitely benefitted my health,” he says, adding that it would likely hold true for cooking, art, or anything else that brings you joy.

Sometimes, a double life won’t cut it – it’s all or nothing. Just ask Jamie Kutch. In 2005, at age 30, he gave up a $250,000 salary as a securities trader to come West, hoping to swap the thick-skin world of Wall Street for the thin skins of his beloved pinot noir grapes. As a transitional buffer, he took a job as a trader in San Francisco, working the wee hours to be in sync with the East coast, and late afternoons and weekends apprenticing at a winery in Sonoma, Napa’s sprawling neighbor to the West. Something had to give…and it wasn’t going to be wine.

“Next to asking my wife to marry me, it’s easily the best decision I’ve ever made,” says Kutch, sitting in RN74, a San Francisco wine bar that serves one of the three pinots he produces under his own name. “It’s a struggle, and there’s been no contributions to the 401k. But it’s also been a wild ride so far.”

It’s a rollercoaster that Mother Nature often has a hand in, sometimes a cruel hand. Much of Kutch’s 2008 crop, sourced from several Sonoma vineyards, was spoiled by frost or wildfires, forcing him to make only one wine for that vintage. “You could actually taste the char and the smoke in the grapes,” he recalls. “But hey, when your name is on the bottle, you don’t cut corners.”

Unlike cabernets, pinot noir is typically a red wine to be drunk up, not laid down. It’s for next Tuesday, not next decade. Kutch’s ambition, however, is to produce lower-alcohol, longer-aging pinots that have more nuance than power. Time will tell. But judging by the 1,500 people on his active mailing list, plus an equal number he can’t yet accommodate, he’s off to a crowd-pleasing start.

A confessed perfectionist, Kutch is still more driven New Yorker than laid-back Californian. But it’s 3 p.m. on a Tuesday, and he’s in a t-shirt and jeans, talking wine, sipping wine, relaxed. He’s getting there. “I don’t miss it too much,” he says of Wall Street. “My ceiling here is usually sky and birds and sun, instead of halogen lights in a cubicle. I love it.”

Even if he’s not master of the wine universe before 40, he’s at least master of his own destiny. We should all have that kind of ceiling.

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